By Sekhar Seshan. Consulting Editor, Business India

With no one being really sure how the Covid-19 pandemic will end, CRISIL saw that it was the time for the credit rating agency to roll up its collective sleeves and get to work serving those who had been affected the most.

“We wasted no time in identifying these sections,” says CRISIL managing director and CEO Ashu Suyash. “The nation-wide lockdown that began in late March affected the lives of daily wagers badly. Hunger was looming large and we had to serve the best way we can.”

The CRISIL Foundation launched a ‘10K meals project’ by re-opening its corporate kitchen in Mumbai, which had been closed because of the lockdown. It has since helped serve over half a million meals at 15 locations across the city through a network of NGOs and CRISIL employees.

CRISIL India also collaborated with its parent S&P Global’s own foundation to distribute meals and dry-ration and sanitation kits across India through the Akshaya Patra Foundation and Sambhav Foundation/LabourNet. Through this, it has collaborated with others to serve nearly a million meals and distribute 17,000-plus kits to migrant workers and daily-wage earners.

A lot of information is coming in on the pandemic and the Indian government has swung into action, but everyone all over the world, from governments to central banks and frontline workers to corporates, is still fighting the war against the virus. This made CRISIL Foundation realise the need to intervene in raising awareness, in terms of both reaching government schemes and relief measures to remote corners of the country and improving digital literacy.